PositiveThe Financial Times\"David Gilmour, in his highly readable social history The British in India, conveniently skirts that historical debate, finessing it with an a-bit-of-good-a-bit-of-bad conclusion, focusing instead on the human aspects of British life in India over three centuries ... He thus gives a voice to the distant denizens of imposing government houses, mysterious bungalows, out-of-bounds cantonments and whites-only clubs. In an uncertain post-Brexit world, this nostalgic dive into life during the Raj could provide timely comfort and a sense of a powerful, sepia-tinted past ... Gilmour’s narrative, however charming, cannot airbrush the ugly realities of colonial rule: the duplicity, greed and smug self-justification that fuelled British political and racial domination of India or indeed the economic looting of a once wealthy civilisation.\
Akhil Sharma
PositiveThe Financial TimesSharma’s ample talent and focus on technical literary achievement are on full display here even if the themes of the stories tend to overlap, a fact more obvious in a collection than when they were published individually. A keen Hemingway student, he has achieved commendable lucidity in his prose, making a conscious effort to free the narrative from weighty metaphors or descriptions of sense, smell or feel. In fact, he seems to be writing from a distance, as if wielding a very long nib, with each sentence a clean, measured stroke. That enables him to keep an even, if at times impersonal, voice that neither rises in anger nor quivers in sadness ... Sharma is clearly more comfortable writing about immigrant India than India itself, where his knowledge appears restricted to a certain time and place ... His considerable narrative prowess deserves full play in the wider world that he knows best, unashamedly immigrant and beyond.
